Cite as: 529 U. S. 1 (2000)
Thomas, J., dissenting
Security benefits claim for purposes of 42 U. S. C. § 405(g) is accomplished by the near-costless act of filing an application for benefits, to be contrasted with the extremely burdensome presentment requirement facing the aliens in Haitian Refugee Center or the named plaintiff in Ringer. The only significant hardship facing the claimants in Salfi arose from the possibility that a lengthy administrative review process would postpone a judicial decision ordering the Secretary to pay the disputed benefits; but the Court took care of that problem by leniently construing § 405(g)'s requirement of a "final" agency decision and by allowing the Secretary to waive entirely § 405(g)'s requirement that decision be made "after a hearing." At bottom, then, the majority cannot demonstrate why the presumption in favor of preenforcement review, which dates at least from Abbott Laboratories, should not be invoked to resolve the debate between our conflicting readings of § 1395ii.
There is a practical reason why we employ the presumption not only to questions of whether judicial review is available, but also to questions of when judicial review is available. Delayed review—that is, a requirement that a regulated entity disobey the regulation, suffer an enforcement proceeding by the agency, and only then seek judicial review—may mean no review at all. For when the costs of "presenting" a claim via the delayed review route exceed the costs of simply complying with the regulation, the regulated entity will buckle under and comply, even when the regulation is plainly invalid. See Seidenfeld, Playing Games with the Timing of Judicial Review, 58 Ohio St. L. J. 85, 104 (1997). And we can expect that this consequence will often flow from an interpretation of an ambiguous statute to bar preenforcement review. In Haitian Refugee Center, for example, the aliens' "postenforcement" review option for asserting their challenge to the agency's procedures required the aliens to voluntarily surrender themselves for deportation, suffer an order of deporta-
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